


To Describe Emptiness

by unheroics



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 14:23:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12985944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unheroics/pseuds/unheroics
Summary: It has been a long time since Liara thought herself lacking. Being in Shepard’s squad made her feel downright inadequate.





	To Describe Emptiness

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Febricant and Renne for being supportive of my continuing mental breakdown over space wives. Mild warning for depictions of Shepard's trauma recovery in the aftermath of the destroy ending.

**one.**

It has been a long time since Liara thought herself lacking. Decades, in fact. Her first dig, the varren that had swarmed the ground team trying to attempt to unearth what proved to be nothing more than a turian waste processing unit from the Unification War era. She hadn’t even fired a pistol, protecting herself and two salarian postdoctoral candidates with a barrier that only she could see shivered with every terrified breath she’d taken. It was almost quaint, in retrospect, how scared Liara had been then. It had prompted her to look into combat-oriented biotics use, for self-defense if nothing else. She had thought herself lacking. Too young, unfit for the task.

Being in Shepard’s squad made her feel downright inadequate. Courting death each time the shore party touched down in the Mako, itself a hazard, given Shepard’s driving: if Liara had thought Therum difficult, her standards for difficulty soon expanded beyond her wildest imaginings. Half the time, she thought it was watching Shepard that kept her alive, gave her the strength to keep going when every muscle and bone in her body protested the strain. As if Shepard’s will, cast in titanium, was itself enough to ameliorate anyone’s pain threshold or fear response or simple lack of skill.

Sometimes Liara felt safest in the middle of a firefight, her barriers up but more importantly Shepard raining cover fire with a mad exuberance to her movements, as if her own body was only alive and most fulfilled when facing its own mortality. It was thrilling. It was terrifying.

Shepard was both of those things, the force of her personality such that Liara thought surely she should obliterate anyone caught helplessly in her orbit, pinned by one look, or one forearm against the throat, or —

Well. Liara spent quite a lot of time pretending to work while, in the privacy of her thoughts, she remembered Shepard helping her up on Therum as if Liara weighed nothing, or Shepard putting her weight behind a punch, or the muscles in her forearms tense with the effort of keeping her finger on the trigger and not jostling her aim, or the crescent symmetry of her omni-tool’s light as it cut through armour and flesh.

They said some humans had that effect, that being short-lived and lightly-built and made to die easily made them like this: brightly burning comets keeping an audience captive in their fall into self-inflicted immolation. And oh, did Shepard burn brightly.

Liara needed to keep up. If she wanted to stay alive, she had to keep up; if she wanted to be seen as an equal, she had to keep up.

“You just need some alone time with an M-4 or an M-9, T’Soni. Get a feel for the recoil, build up calluses,” said Garrus, prompted by nothing more than Liara’s scowl as she unclipped her armour chest plate after a mission, Shepard already stripped to her fatigues and crossing the shuttle bay. Sweat made her hair stick to the back of her neck; she was bleeding, sluggishly, from a graze on her forearm and she radiated satisfaction, and inadequacy burned Liara’s tongue as she swallowed her pride to say, “I don’t think I’ll ever measure up to you.”

His mandibles flared in amusement. “True, but it’s nice to have an unattainable standard to aspire to. Keeps you humble. Listen: there’s a range down in C-Sec. I could get you access for when we’re next in dock, if you’d like.”

Two missions later, as the _Normandy_ hummed and ambled its way across Citadel-controlled space, “That was some good work,” Shepard told her when she came to check in on Liara, in that way that she had: drop by, as though it were nothing, showing solidarity and support to the crewmember whom others considered a necessary evil at best, a ticking time bomb of betrayal and dangerous agendas at worst. Benezia’s shadow was heavy. It clung, like emissions from a fried engine, clotting in Liara’s chest and keeping her voice quieter than she would like.

“Thank you.”

“Watching your biotics in action —” Shepard smiled with half of her mouth, both her eyes, and all of her voice. And still it was slanted, her tone so often self-deprecating. Like a person who knew her social limitations, but still walked into the minefields of awkward encounters with both feet on the ground. “I’m glad you’re on our side, is all.”

“I could say the same.” She wondered why Shepard still found her biotics impressive, having fought Liara’s mother. “I am…glad that you’re on my side.”

For a moment she thought Shepard would say something else: something soft and unknowable clouded her gaze, but what she settled on was, “Any time. So Garrus tells me you’ve got a hot date scheduled with the C-Sec firing range?”

Liara touched the back of her neck, pressing her fingers against the soft underbelly of her crest. “I believe it would improve my performance in the field, biotics or no. I don’t want to —” _Slow you down_. She bit the inside of her cheek; Shepard saw through her. Humour dimmed in her eyes.

“You are not a liability, Liara.” The way she said Liara’s name, kindness and iron all wrapped together, safety and impregnability, a microcosm of the _Normandy_ as Liara came to know it. No wonder Shepard so often seemed larger than life, when the closest comparison she brought to mind was a next-gen starship. “I don’t play nice with incompetent people; if I couldn’t use you, I wouldn’t have assigned you to the ground team.”

“I know, Shepard.” And she did know it. She knew herself to be competent and strong enough to keep up; but the keeping up was taking a toll. Liara doubted a woman like Shepard, who lived her life with a weight of spoken and unspoken responsibility forever strapped to her shoulders like the armour plates of her flight suit, would understand the distinction. Shepard did not have to think about keeping up. She excelled instinctively, naturally, with so little visible effort it would be easy to think it, in fact, effortless.

“As long as we’re clear on that.” She leaned back against the bulkhead besides the hatch, arms across her chest. Shepard had a tendency to distribute her weight unevenly, compensating for the weight of a weapon that was not always there, and it translated into a tilt to her hips that looked almost arrogant. “You know, we could go together. It’s been some time since I last shot at targets that didn’t try to shoot me back.”

Being in Shepard’s squad taught Liara one more thing: it was difficult, sometimes downright impossible, to tell her no.

The range was nestled in a sub-level beneath C-Sec headquarters, and word from Garrus must have travelled ahead. Very few officers paid much heed to Shepard and Liara save a cursory id scan at the entrance; Liara submitted a biosignature (“Bluntly unimpressed: the theft of small arms is a serious matter,” the desk sergeant informed her), Shepard flashed her Spectre credentials, and then they were alone, the door hissing shut, soundproof bulkheads blocking out the sounds of lives being led outside, a busy dayshift at C-Sec, the comings and goings at the Citadel.

“Oh, nice,” Shepard said as she made a straight line for the weapons rack at the other side of the room. “I’ve been eyeing the M-99 for ages, but the prototypes I’ve seen at Kassa had balance problems on reload…”

Liara watched her, the way she could offer Liara her back as though she were not trained to avoid it — and the lines of it, in uniform, the dip at her waist, and lower, the solid muscle of her thighs. Shepard was built heavier than asari tended towards, though Liara imagined that without rigorous physical training she would have been far more lanky. The thought of it made her smile.

“What would you recommend?” she asked, coming up next to Shepard, careful to keep a respectful distance, for her own peace of mind and to ameliorate Shepard’s soldier instincts. Liara knew enough commandos to know how much they valued personal space. “I’ve had some experience with the Acolyte, but Garrus suggested I build up strength with an Alliance model.”

She only realised the potential for innuendo when Shepard choked, then laughed. “I did not mean —”

“No, it’s — it’s fine. You could…I guess you can’t go wrong with the M-4.” She cleared her throat. “Solid weight, fits like a glove. Flexible if you know how to handle it. Here.”

Not trusting herself to sound dignified, Liara picked up the pistol to which Shepard pointed.

It did fit nicely in her hand. The weight wasn’t such that it could distract her, or limit her biotics. Liara strengthened her grip. “Well then. Shall we?”

Then it was easier, almost easy, to lead Shepard into the range proper, where no C-Sec officers practised on their own, and Liara could very nearly relax as she watched Shepard assemble the prototype sniper rifle she’d picked for herself. It was a powerful weapon, but lean, not exactly compact — the barrel came with a bipod to support its length and weight. Liara looked away before she could draw silly metaphors, see parallels. She set to work on the targets.

Some of her anxiety evaporated once she began firing. It was as if a light went up in her head: she felt tired muscles setting into a rhythm that, while did nothing for the pain, moulded itself around it and moved her body with it. Breathe in, breathe out; fire. Again. And again.

It was only when she stopped to replace the thermal clip that she realised there was no corresponding fire at her side. Shepard stood leaning against the terminal, the rifle assembled but untouched at her side. Liara flushed at the frank appraisal in Shepard’s gaze, and what was either interest or Liara’s wishful thinking.

“Shepard.” It felt like enough to say; Shepard’s name meant so many things.

“Now I get why you’re struggling,” Shepard said. She sounded different, lower. She sounded winded just from watching. “You’re tense as hell, Liara. It’s a wonder you haven’t broken your forearms yet, with the way you’re locking your elbows.”

“Actually, I feel quite relaxed right now.”

Shepard took a few steps forwards and tapped her gently on the shoulder; Liara winced.

“Yeah,” she said. “Thought so.” She moved with purpose: she positioned herself behind Liara, not touching — not yet, and oh, that was a very inopportune thought to have about one’s commander — but close enough to exude warmth, like the clip Liara dumped, and just as likely to burn her fingers if she touched her.

“Right here,” Shepard said, and nudged Liara’s feet slightly further apart. She did it with a gentleness Liara wouldn’t have thought her capable of. “The wider your stance the better your shot. Your centre of mass would be around…here?” She pressed her knuckles against the small of Liara’s back, below the concave curve of her spine; her breath tickled the coiled membrane around Liara’s ear. Liara’s own breath felt heavy, so she forced it out. Shepard’s touch was enough that she had difficulty inhaling again.

She could not have pointed to her centre of mass if her life depended on it in that moment. Shepard’s voice was strained at the edges. Liara only nodded, and felt Shepard nod in response, the shift in the air at the tiny movement.

“Right. Now the shoulders — but first, unlock your elbows. Keep ‘em easy, so the impact will get absorbed before it hits your upper arms. Here.”

Her hand slid up Liara’s right forearm, cupping the elbow until Liara relaxed. She allowed herself to lean back into the circle of Shepard’s arms, allowed herself to feel the rise and fall of her chest, her breasts pressed to Liara’s back. Shepard’s free hand moved to steady her at the hip, and Liara only glanced down briefly — blunt nails, a burn scar that looked as if Shepard had got it from a hot shell casing, all so familiar already — before she forced her attention to the target. It was difficult. It was torturous.

“Breathe in, now.”

Liara breathed in. Shepard flattened her palm against Liara’s abdomen, not quite pushing, as if just to feel it. Every instinct Liara possessed yelled at her to lean back, lean into it, press up against Shepard’s front, see whether she was as warm there as everywhere else, if the flat planes of her abdomen were the one place on her body that was soft.

“Breathe out,” Shepard murmured. Her lips brushed the scale at Liara’s cheek. “And — fire.”

Liara fired. Recoil was so much less forceful, she actually felt a muscle group in her shoulder begin to ease, instead of staying rigid in anticipation. The impact still pushed her body into Shepard; Shepard’s hands on her tightened, but didn’t push her away. They both stood motionless, breathing in tandem. When did that happen? When did Shepard begin breathing to match Liara?

“Goddess,” Liara managed, low and a little choked. The target sported a hole right at the centre of its inoffensively humanoid head.

“You’re a natural.”

“I…think that was all you, Shepard.”

The loss, when Shepard stepped back and Liara could turn to face her, was absurd. That was what she told herself. Shepard’s eyes were darker than she had seen before, and momentarily Liara wasn’t sure what to make of the change in her complexion; then she remembered that the human cardiovascular system allowed them to blush, that it was heat in Shepard’s face. Her breathing was strangely shallow.

Liara opened her mouth to ask if she was all right, and then it hit her, all at once. Dilated pupils, elevated heart rate that she’d felt against her own body, blood visible beneath Shepard’s skin, uneven respiration; all indicators. _Stop thinking like a scientist_. She was still holding the pistol. Shepard followed her gaze, made an aborted move in her direction as if to take it. Her knuckles brushed Liara’s wrist. They both inhaled. Shepard stood close enough that Liara could —

The door hissed open.

“With hurt indignation,” a C-Sec officer was saying as he lumbered into the range, and Shepard nearly jumped out of her skin trying to get some space between her and Liara, “I never cheat. It is unfair of you to imply I do.”

The turian he came in with twitched his mandibles. “All I’m saying is your face is not made for Skyllian Five, you’re unreadable, that’s like cheating.”

Their conversation registered to Liara even as her eyes remained fixed on Shepard, but the moment was gone, and uncomfortable silence settled over them like eternal storms over gas giants. The first few times they’d talked settled heavily over Liara. She remembered her awkward enthusiasm and her instinctive need for distance, and Shepard giving her space, every time. She gave her space, now, smiling a tiny crooked smile as she said, “Well. I should probably go.”

“I…enjoyed the lesson, Shepard.” Oh, she sounded like a lovestruck maiden. Perhaps she was one.

“Yeah.” Shepard resolutely looked away, rubbed the back of her neck, moving away. Always moving away. “Yeah, me too. We can do it again sometime.”

“I’d like that.”

And until then, Liara would only have to keep up, stay alive. Stay an equal.

 

**two.**

Victory looked good on Shepard. She carried it with natural ease, the relief and the satisfaction, and somewhat surprisingly Liara loved her most when she was watching her on comms with Alliance Command, her back straight and proud and her shoulders strong enough to carry the world. She could map every line, crevice and curve of Shepard’s spine and her wrists crossed at the small of her back, every rib and the spaces between them. Every vertebra.

She did it now, watching Shepard at the Arcturus Station firing range — one of the many, from what Liara had gathered — as she burned through four thermal clips.

They had been in drydock for six artificial solar day cycles. It was the first time the _Normandy_ had a chance to get properly re-outfitted following the fight against Sovereign, with the Citadel engineering corps possessing only a fraction of the clearance necessary to act upon a vessel of this class. The Systems Alliance wanted to slowly, methodically debrief the entire crew: bring a semblance of order and bureaucracy to shackle the seemingly miraculous events that had transpired; Saren’s death, Sovereign’s fall, the Citadel’s desperate struggle, and Shepard in the middle of it, her people rallied besides her in mutiny. There was talk that Liara had overheard on crewdeck about a formal hearing, if only so the human generals could put themselves at ease. Assure themselves of their influence. Remind Shepard of her place in the military hierarchy, as though her Spectre status had not already put her outside the law and observable galactic treaties.

On the second day cycle, Ashley had taken Liara for a tour of what she’d called the most impressive places on Arcturus, culminating in a front row view of the SSV _Aconcagua_ , a far larger dreadnought than Liara was used to seeing. Ashley had looked so proud, as if the ship were hers to command.

Liara couldn’t entirely get used to the number of humans wherever she looked — a stable population of forty-five thousand, Joker had informed her. She had quickly grown tired of fresh recruits whose exposure to nonhuman species had been minimal, and who started at her, or Wrex, or Tali, with a pronounced lack of subtlety.

“It’s a compliment,” Ashley had said. She’d grinned at Liara’s disbelieving look. “Don’t worry, Doc, I’m joking. There’s a whole lot of hormonal humans here who’ve never seen an asari before, bless their hearts, but if it makes you feel better I’m pretty sure a solid half of them can’t decide right now whether to ogle you or ask Wrex to ravish them with his giant sexy —”

“ _Chief Williams_ ,” Liara scolded, but it had been too late; they were both laughing, doubly so once Wrex had returned from his foray into the food stand nearby, grumbling about serving sizes fit for baby pyjaks.

And now she watched Shepard burn through four clips with the same slowness, the same method, as the Alliance admirals tried to compress her, make her compact and presentable, less than the sum of her parts. Liara might have felt like an animal beneath the curious stares of young human recruits, but Shepard looked like one: caged, tense, ready to snap and sink her teeth into whoever tried to touch her.

Something about being on Shepard’s crew must have permanently broken an integral element of Liara’s survival instinct. The thought of braving a wild animal made her only warmer in her flight suit. She never considered herself a thrillseeker, but Shepard had a tendency to bring out the best in people.

“You can stop hovering any time now,” Shepard said, and Liara did not jump. Neither did she smart at the impatience in Shepard’s voice. “Who sent you, Joker or Ash? I’m fine.”

Liara moved to stand beside her at the terminal. Shepard hadn’t bothered to replace the target dummy, and it sported a gruesome assortment of jagged burn marks. Shredder rounds. “Yes, I can see that.”

“Liara…”

With a resolute tilt to her chin, Liara stepped in behind Shepard, in the place she knew Shepard marked as vulnerable: no field of vision, reflexes primed for danger. She dug her knuckles into the curve at the small of Shepard’s back, where she imagined the tight knot of muscle to be worst, where the pain would be centralised. Despite the layers of fatigues and Liara’s gloves, she felt Shepard’s tension as though it were her own, like the static charge of biotics thrumming beneath her skin. If she closed her eyes and opened her mind, she would feel Shepard bright as a beacon at the centre of her consciousness; she did not close her eyes.

“You’re tired,” she said instead, with no rebuke, willing Shepard to relax. Lean into her. Lean on her. Liara did not have to join their minds to read Shepard’s frustration warring with pride, all tangled up in the barbed wire of duty. “You have told me so many times that you’re a soldier, not a politician.”

“It’s the truth.”

“But it’s not only that. What is it that bothers you?”

She was not prepared for the jumpy way that Shepard spun to face her, and so her curled hand stayed across Shepard’s abdomen, just beneath where Liara knew her navel to be, where she spent so much of the time they had alone marvelling at the physiological similarities between asari and female humans. Shepard made a furtive gesture, shoulders still stiff, then remembered the pistol in her dominant hand and put it back on the terminal. For a moment she hesitated, a reticent soldier to the bone, but in the end she only sighed.

“Wrex talked to me. He asked that we drop him off at Tuchanka whenever we’re passing a relay that connects to the krogan DMZ.”

Liara had an idea where Shepard was going with this. Around them, the range was silent save for the steady whirr of the virtual intelligence in charge of security; Arcturus, for all the forty-five thousand residents aboard, was rather quiet by Liara’s standards. Nothing compared to Armali, or the small orbital station adjacent to her old university, or Illium. She took a calculated risk and stepped closer, and felt the response in Shepard’s body, the slight incline of her back towards Liara.

“And?”

“And Garrus is five minutes from deciding whether he wants back in with C-Sec or the Spectre training programme,” Shepard said. A muscle jumped in her jaw. “They’re just waiting for the hearings and the debriefs to be over. And…” She didn’t continue. She looked away, scowling more at herself than anything external.

“They’re leaving,” Liara said, and knew she hit the nail on the head when Shepard’s whole body twitched, an involuntary reaction. “But they will always be your team, Shepard. You will always be the most significant thing that has ever happened to them. Besides, Tali will remain. She has expressed a desire to complete her pilgrimage aboard the _Normandy_. And — for what it’s worth, I…”

“Don’t ‘for what it’s worth’ me.”

“I would like to stay aboard as well,” Liara said. Another step closer; she could smell Shepard’s sweat and the thin ozone tinge of her fatigues, vacuum-washed as they were. Gunpowder that she imagined more than she smelled it. The warmth she felt in her dreams, in the hindbrain of her conscious mind. “As a consultant, perhaps. I must admit that I’ve gotten used to my lab.” She did not say: you are the most significant thing that has ever happened to me.

Shepard’s demeanour could change in the blink of an eye, and it did now, and they might not have been talking about her tortuously acknowledged fear of change thirty seconds prior. She was the one to close the distance between them, the bare inches of uncharged air. Her hands on Liara’s hips, her nose — her mouth — so close to Liara’s that she could smell propellant. “That all? You’re just here for the lab space?”

“You’re fishing,” Liara said.

She had to bite her tongue to keep from yelping when Shepard grabbed her, lifted her, and then Liara was laughing quietly into the warm crook of Shepard’s shoulder as Shepard sat her on the terminal behind her. Hands on thighs, grip never enough to hurt or bruise; Shepard had the gentlest touch as if compensating for all the violence her hands did, for the blood, the victories and their body counts. Something beeped behind Liara and the target dummy was replaced with a fresh one, but she didn’t care about the disruption.

Shepard’s hands left her thighs and found the tender places beneath her crest, the membrane there poised to tingle at her touch, and when Shepard kissed her Liara was already opening her mouth, biting her lower lip, a thrum of please-please-you as she pulled Shepard closer. Another half minute and she’d be grinding against Shepard’s hip, the ridge of bone and uncomfortable uniform pants, but that was Shepard all over: she made Liara ready to go with a look, left her wanting so much it hurt not to touch her. She made Liara feel reckless and unbreakable. Liara made some kind of noise when Shepard nipped at her chin, mouthed along the line of her jaw, Liara’s legs wrapped around her waist and pushing for more.

“Not the best place for this,” Shepard mumbled into the cool, dry scale of Liara’s neck.

Hesitation simply wouldn’t do. Liara cupped her face in both hands, forcing Shepard to look up and look her in the eye. “It just so happens that the security system is in lockdown. Something about hanar excrement all over the floor. Very messy.”

The smile that Shepard gave her could have powered a binary star system. For a moment she looked ready to say something real, and serious, and wholly inappropriate for what they were about to do in a public firing range. _Me too_ , Liara thought. She left the words unspoken on Shepard’s lips, kissing her with the slow margin of all the time they didn’t have, not really. It was the kind of kiss Liara would have liked to carry in a pocket of her uniform, over the pulsing centre of her vascular system. Her fingers were in Shepard’s hair, loose and comfortable as though they belonged there; and Shepard between her spread thighs as though she belonged there, too.

“You think of everything,” Shepard said quietly when she broke for air, pressing their foreheads together. Black film encroached on the corners of Liara’s vision, but she pushed it back; she wanted only to feel her own body, to feel Shepard feeling her, together in their separate minds. Nothing transcendental, only flesh and bone and cartilage and scale. Fragile bodies that refused to break.

She kissed the corner of Shepard’s mouth, and had to fight gravity itself to tilt her head back, look her in the eye. “For you, somebody has to.”

 

**three.**

“What is it like?” Shepard had asked her once, in her cabin, in bed, both their legs tangled in the starched vacuum-pressed Alliance issue sheets. Liara bridged the space between them with one arm, fingers following the gentle curve of the shell of Shepard’s ear, exposed and vulnerable. “When you — you know.”

What did it feel like? It felt like death and rebirth, like how Liara imagined stars felt when they collapsed; it felt as though she could grasp all of her tomorrows and all of Shepard’s yesterdays and thread them together into an infinite present. She was never more real and Shepard was never more alien, unknowable, familiar. Never more necessary. She could see inside Shepard’s synapses and feel each individual strand of DNA, the galactic dust that made them and connected them and would, in time, pull them apart and back into the voidless immensity of the universal whole. Liara had had no words to explain it then; she never did.

“Almost as good as this,” she had said instead, and rolled onto her front again until they were close together and she could kiss Shepard, trace the curve of her hip, the soft slope of her breast, and not think about splintering futures.

Now, in a rundown little firing range on Illium that served as a perfect spot for back alley deals and uninterrupted intel exchange, Liara traced the angular ridges of the M-12, the sweat-absorbent microfibre of the grip, and thought about the past. The target dummies were half derelict, one of them slouching off to the side, its balance cracked along the outline of a high-powered round that had exploded on impact.

Liara burned through the thermal clip without seeing any of the shots connect, realising what she’d done only when she registered the high-frequency alarm of the overheating weapon.

 _Keep it together._ She might have been on Illium, barely the entrepot, but criminal elements could smell fear and inexperience as well as any slaver or smuggler in the Terminus Systems.

When she heard the hatch hissing open, her instincts — her _Normandy_ instincts, honed and polished since her departure — kicked in before she could think about it and doubt. She had the pistol trained directly between the first batarian’s primary pair of eyes before he and his compatriot could take two steps inside. If she wasn’t a live wire of tension and stamped-down fear, Liara would have thought it the beginning of a joke. Shepard would have. Two batarians walk into a bar. But Shepard was gone.

“Easy, miss,” the batarian she had in her crosshairs said. “T’Soni, right?”

Liara swallowed. Her armour was the only thing she’d taken from the _Normandy_ , unwilling to part with — unwilling to part with the last thing of hers, even borrowed from the Alliance, that Shepard had touched. “I take it you are the Broker’s agents.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” His voice was a low rumble, like a landslide in dense gravity. Not quite krogan, but getting there, and Liara would have preferred krogan. At least she had some experience with them. The pirates making their rounds between Omega and Illium were an unknown. “Fact is, there’s intel you want and there’s payment _we_ want, although — well, miss, I’m willing to negotiate.”

When Liara closed her eyes, she saw Shepard ordering her to leave in the escape shuttle with the rest of the crew; she saw herself herding the technical and support staff and strapping herself in, and then the wait, and the wait, and the wait. She’d been waiting until she could wait no longer. She’d waited until the last of her hope died, and all that was left was a cold, burning ache at the base of her skull and the knowledge that the universe was not a beautiful whole. It was grief. Random instances of death. Chaos.

She let herself glow with the effervescent charge of biotics. The batarians lifted their guns. One SMG, one shotgun; one Tempest, one Claymore. She could disarm them, she could fire them, she could sabotage their heat processing units until they burned holes through their owners’ hands.

“How about we go with my plan,” she said. The small range echoed and shimmered with the pulse of energy, the weight of it like an additional atmosphere. “You give me the information I paid for, and I don’t rip your molecules apart.”

It happened very fast. The batarian who hadn’t spoken yet — support, she thought, extra muscle to frighten her, as though she hadn’t seen a biomechanical ship the size of a spaceport descend on the Citadel and lived to tell the tale — made a sound, low and angry, ready for her blood. He fired, which meant he’d come in with a clip already loaded and ready for a fight, and it made her furious, it made anger and frustration burn coldly inside her: the first shot grazed her arm, meant to intimidate, and the second, aimed at her kneecap, bounced harmlessly off her shield. Pain flared in Liara’s arm.

“Enough,” she snapped. “That’s _enough_.”

In thirty seconds, one of the batarians was pinned to the ceiling, and the other stood immobile, trapped in her stasis field. Liara knew how to make it pleasant, taught herself at Shepard’s half-tipsy urging to prime her biotics for more than protection or destruction. But she knew how to make it hurt, too. The batarian wanted to scream, and it took physical effort for Liara to keep both his tracheas sealed.

“Do you have the information on you? Nod once for yes.” She lessened the pressure; the batarian nodded. “Good. It’s not ‘miss’, by the way: it’s Doctor.”

And she shot him, then the other, point blank in the throat where batarian physiologies were least likely to manage to regenerate tissue in time. Both bodies dropped to the floor, sprawling, and only began to bleed once Liara let them.

She stepped around them and clipped her pistol back into place, bent to search their uniforms for…there, a small data drive, sticky with what smelled like fishdog hot sauce. She tucked it into an inside pocket of her armour’s chest plate, not quite over her heart but close. Close enough. There was no time to fall apart, just as there hadn’t been time for her to fall apart when everything else had.

With the data drive secured, she checked her upper arm; the armour was peeled and puckered in the place where the shot had connected, but not ruptured. Nothing she couldn’t fix. It would be nice, to actually be able to mend a tiny and insignificant thing like this. It would make a change from the usual messes she got herself into, alone and —

And before she’d been alone.

She had thought she’d have more time. That was all. Sooner or later, she’d known she would be alone, she would grieve, she would move on. It was what asari did, and sometimes Liara could not blame her mother for choosing another asari as her partner, even if it all had gone wrong, but for the brief certainty that they would not spend a quiet eternity in mourning. She’d thought there would be more time for the memories to form, for her to learn to remember every inch of skin and personality she would outlive.

Goddess, she missed Shepard so much she feared it would starve her, drain her from the inside, like the reaving force of offensive biotics turned inwards.

She took a deep breath. Around her, Illium crawled along its orbit and no one cared for her loss, as no one cared for the two corpses dotting an awful little firing range in the city’s lowlife-strewn underbelly. _Keep it together, T’Soni_.

She would, she would. At least until she got her hands on the Shadow Broker.

 

**four.**

Earth was a ruin. It would take years for the infrastructure to be re-established, the time doubled with most of the resources dedicated to getting mass relays operational after the catastrophic event that had rendered them useless, nothing more than massive chunks of unknown alloys thrown out of their orbits and alignments. Two or three were up and running again, after nine months. No one dared wonder what was happening in the Terminus System, or the Attican Traverse.

It had been a unanimous, collective decision to return the _Normandy_ to Earth as soon as it had been physically tenable; that first broadcast from Hackett, summoning the Alliance crew back and welcoming the non-Alliance staff to help with restoration efforts, had been barely a formality.

Wherever Liara looked, death looked back. Bloodstains on concrete that would one day become discoloured and then vanish completely; pieces of armature, geth tech, reaper tech, depowered body fragments of the half-synthetic monstrosities that had terrorised the planet.

The first time she’d seen a banshee’s mangled corpse, if one could have called it a corpse, Liara had to keep herself from falling to her knees: the memory of Thessia had been too much, too soon, too raw. Out there in outer Council space her people were skirting extinction, and the only proof that she wasn’t alone, all alone, were the surviving units of asari commandos now stranded on Earth while the Parnitha relay was being slowly brought back online. They looked at her with no recognition. She looked back disaffectedly, cold on the inside and outside. She needed their presence, the awareness of it, but she did not need them. Perhaps it was a sign of maturity.

Earth was a ruin, the galaxy stood in shambles, and Liara was grateful for every breath of stale polluted air she took.

Her armour and uniform had been nearly melded to her skin in the explosion that took her out of that final push towards the Citadel, and both were unsalvageable, though her skin healed without need for grafting. All she had now were the fatigues of an Alliance servicewoman with some diplomatic patches sewn on. A dead woman’s clothes. Liara hated thinking of them as comfortable, but they were. They were.

She moved through the subterranean bunker that housed the essential Alliance staff in London with purpose, familiar to the guard details, quick to swipe her credentials across the automated locks, so prone to malfunction. The air was overwarm down there, as if the exhaust of every collapsing Reaper’s drive core — if they even had drive cores — had been vented underground, collecting like smog in the crisis headquarters. It was semi-dark, too, dim in most areas. Power management was an issue.

Nonessential staff were stationed three terrestrial miles above, where what Liara’s research had told her was once the West End now sported the largest concentration of nonhuman refugees and the smallest concentration of toxins in the breathable atmosphere. It was all rubble, mostly, anyway. Rubble and strangely shaped buildings repurposed to house survivors, streets and squares peppered with relief tents and interspecies mobile security units trying to keep looting and violence to a minimum.

At the end of the world London became a microcosm of the united galaxy: those who lived clung to others like them, race and conflicting physiologies secondary to the simple need for comfort and proof of life.

The medical wing was as repurposed as the buildings and houses aboveground, with traces of old conference rooms and crew quarters still in view. Miranda, having accepted the full pardon for her actions while a Cerberus loyalist but refused the official recognition of her part in unmasking the crimes committed at the Sanctuary facility, had commandeered the medical staff even before the _Normandy_ had reached Earth. Doctor Chakwas had been perfectly at home assisting her following Shepard’s recovery from the burnt-out husk of the Citadel.

The physical therapy room had once been a firing range, with the ceiling still sporting metal tracks that would have been used for maneuvering target dummies. These days, Liara needed very little target practice. She barely left the bunker. She had no need to, even with all the messages and transmissions urging her to relocate to the archives on Mars and assist the researchers there. No; all she needed was right there, in the perfunctory PT room, her fight back to full mobility overseen by Miranda, struggling to progress from wheelchair to crutches as though the distance were an insurmountable abyss.

It was why Liara ignored her mounting correspondence. Someone had to be waiting for Shepard on the other side. Someone had to be there to catch her when she took that leap of faith, and if Liara had anything for Shepard, it was faith. Both hands open. Waiting.

In the moment before Shepard registered her keying the door open, Liara watched her: sweaty hair beginning to grow out of its post-surgery buzz cut, muscle weak from misuse beginning arduously to fill out. Shepard supported herself on both arms as she braved the treadmill, the slowest setting, her chest heaving with the effort that each step required. The neck of her Alliance issue t-shirt was wet with sweat, but her hands didn’t shake. She was more skin graft and scar tissue than woman, pneumatic actuators in the shoulder and elbow hissing as she extended the arm that had needed to be completely replaced.

She saw Liara, then, and immediately looked away as if ashamed to be seen. But her expression softened, and her eyes, clear and bright and alive, were warm.

“Remember how I was on my feet the second you woke me up, way back when?” she asked Miranda, who only snorted and shook her head. “Wish you’d do that again.”

“You weren’t dead this time, Shepard. Close enough, but it’s still a crucial difference.”

“Maybe you’re just slipping.”

“Reverse psychology? I would’ve thought it beneath you.”

Shepard sighed, attempting a shrug then giving up, the effort too much. “Worth a try.”

Liara nodded to Miranda, and received a thin smile in return. She’d rarely met people as reticent and shielded as Miranda, whose personality was masked by layers upon layers of protective walls, but once she’d met the woman beneath all of that armour, she liked her quite a lot. Besides, she had been instrumental in restoring Shepard; she had been the one to decide it was time to bring her out of the medically induced coma, the one to personally take charge of her physical therapy.

Meanwhile, Liara was the one to negotiate Shepard’s terms of being brought back to life. It hadn’t gone without a hitch. Shepard wanted to be kept officially dead. She didn’t want the knowledge of her survival to be public. “I’ve had enough heroics,” she had said, still in a bed and so fragile-looking Liara had not left her side for a single minute, and Liara had said, “All right. All right,” because she got it, she understood.

“You’re doing well, Shepard,” she said, coming over. It was instinct to put her hand over Shepard’s biceps, lightly, so as not to hurt.

“She is,” said Miranda, just as Shepard said, “Am I? Could’ve fooled me,” and they glared at each other, no heat and all hard-won affection.

Miranda shook her head again. She lifted her omni-tool and powered down the treadmill, and Shepard staggered, for just a step, before Liara could hold her up despite her protests, the muttered _I’m fine, I’m fine,_. The exhaustion made her shake, but she kept herself upright.

“We’re done for today,” Miranda said, with the faintest ghost of a smile that Liara would have called a smirk if she hadn’t known her. “That’s good progress, Shepard. Don’t overachieve and set us back, understood?”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever you say.” Shepard spoke the words largely into Liara’s shoulder, and Liara rubbed her back the same way Benezia had rubbed hers when she had been a girl, scared after a bad dream. She pretended not to notice the way Shepard leaned into her, too weak to support herself, as Miranda touched Liara’s wrist and left without another word. Her next PT time with Shepard was scheduled for tomorrow, or in eighteen hours; it was difficult, underground, to tell what ‘tomorrow’ meant.

“Thank you,” Liara said to Miranda’s retreating back, and saw her shoulders move, a shrug or a spike in tension. Perhaps she ducked her head. Perhaps she smiled, where no one could see it.

“Her ego’s gonna get too big to be contained by this godforsaken bunker,” Shepard muttered, still into the fabric bunched loose over Liara’s shoulder, but she was easy, pliant, exhausted but still upright and keeping herself vertical and steady with Liara’s aid. Before she’d lost some muscle mass and weight from inactivity and confinement to a sickbed, even though Liara was by no means weak, she would not have been able to support Shepard’s whole weight. Now it took no more effort than she was able to give to help Shepard from the treadmill and into the wheelchair.

Once there Shepard deflated, breathed; Liara would never get tired of watching her chest rising with each inhale, dropping on an exhale. Her whole body ached in sympathy in those quiet moments of Shepard dropping her head, very slightly, and allowing a fraction of vulnerability shine through the titanium alloys of the brave face she presented to the world. She could not let herself be only flesh and bone: creatures of flesh and bone weren’t made to shoulder the weights that Shepard routinely carried. At the end of it all, the first small selfish request she’d ever made was to be given the freedom of public death.

It lasted no more than a minute before she swallowed and put steel back into her spine. She hated being steered in the wheelchair, and so Liara walked at her side, furtively eyeing the flex of Shepard’s biceps, the damp patches on her t-shirt, the hair curling where it touched sweaty skin. Of course, Shepard saw. She was good at that.

“So, Doctor T’Soni…” She gave Liara a calculated come-hither look, strained only at the corners. They were so far beyond juvenile come-ons, but Liara loved it, Shepard making an effort to act this way, sweet and silly as if nothing had touched her or broken her. “Your place or mine?”

Liara looked straight ahead, but she couldn’t hide her wide smile. “Your vitals are barely stable, Commander. Marriage, old age and tiny blue daughters can wait until you can stand on your own.”

“Long as it’s all still on the table. I didn’t die twice just to —” She trailed off when she saw Liara go rigid by her side. It hurt to think, though not as much as it hurt to keep smiling, and with a tired noise Shepard looked away. They both looked ahead and not at each other, but Shepard might as well be whispering directly into Liara’s ear when she said, without apologising outright, “Okay. Too soon.” And, without breaking her stride, arms working to keep the wheelchair running so Liara could have her moment of sheer, blinding, raw grief open and close like a wound inside her that would never fully heal: “How’s Glyph?”

“I think it likes Tali more than it ever liked me. But we’re making progress, in-between the endless debriefings.”

“And Feron? Any word from the Terminus Systems?”

“No, not yet. My entire network remains stranded on the other side of those relays; until much later, the Shadow Broker might have to remain in semi-retirement.”

They were going to be fine. Liara could breathe easier with every step she took, with Shepard faithfully keeping her pace. They were going to be fine: the worst thing that could have happened already had, and they occupied the fragile aftermath of a galaxy torn asunder and limping, but alive.

Liara moved ahead to swipe her id badge over the door controls, and shouldered them fully open when the magnetic locks froze halfway through. She did not avoid looking at Shepard. It was only that the corridor sections of the bunker were half-dark, illuminated in places by red emergency lights spilling from the ceiling or high up on the walls. Most of the power was being rerouted to the living quarters, the meeting rooms, the science and medical facility.

One day Liara would take a warm shower again. She lived in hope.

There was condensation on the walls, faint tracks of dampness. The filtration system must have been struggling. Something to forward to the engineering team.

“After everything,” said Shepard, quietly, a flash of honesty where she took off her armour and let Liara see her as she really was, “I think we’ve earned a break. You’re probably a better shot than I am by now, and if that’s not reason enough to retire, I don’t know what is.”

 _After everything_. Shepard talked about the Reapers in oblique references, and Liara knew — they all knew, Miranda and Tali and Doctor Chakwas, the rest of the team stationed above ground in civilian quarters and relief tents, trying to be useful and put Earth back together brick by brick — they knew that sooner or later it would come spilling out of Shepard, the grief and the fury, either willing or unwilling, in a torrent or an explosion.

Liara kept her chin up. “We can always re-repurpose your PT room, improvise some target dummies. I bet there are tricks you could still teach me.”

“Liara, flattery will get you everywhere with me. It’s a date.”

Sooner or later she would have to snap. And Liara would be there to find her at the precipice, take her hand and catch her before she fell. It happened so many times before, whether it was her or Shepard reaching out in just the right moment to save the day. Liara made the connection long before and knew it wasn’t the joining of minds that felt to her like the collapse of a star: it was Shepard, and her, and it was every second they shared in a time when time itself was unravelling. She didn’t need to see inside Shepard’s consciousness to see their future, each of their tomorrows, perhaps not as naive and rosy as she’d once imagined. There would be struggle, and there would be pain, and perhaps neither of them were the women they’d once been, too changed by death and mourning, but what mattered was what they did with the pieces of them that were left —

The unprotected back of Shepard’s neck, the pistol that Liara had long learned to sleep with close-by, the blood they’d both spilled and the victory that Shepard paid for with unending sacrifices. Their tomorrows spiralling out of an infinite present.

It has been a long time since Liara thought herself lacking. She did not think herself lacking now.


End file.
